March has been a stormy month on many fronts, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank stirred up the world financially, Trump’s upcoming indictment, Russia and China leaders met and continue to draw a murky picture on how the world will return to a more peaceful state. And… actual storms hit all across the US! California is hit hard with heavy wind, snow, rain, hail, and even… a tornado?!
I just appreciate how lucky I am as there has been little to no impact to me from these events. Yet, global warming and the multi-year drought is still very much in the picture - we, as individuals and as communities, need to do more to move to renewable energy as well as water desalination tech. (we are updating our home electricals and getting ready for an induction stove!)
Here are the things that kept me busy this past month, aside from the day-to-day ‘job’ related stuff…
Creating and hacking stuffs
Game Dev
‘Qin’ - an action game based on the story of China’s first emperor…
I am still stuck on progressing on this and it has been a full quarter now! I am still trying to put together an inventory system that displays as part of the player’s HUD UI…
Drawing
Weekly project drawing - the new project has formally started! It took me some time at the beginning to get the templates and process down, but here are the first two!
Study drawings - realizing I need to practice and study more about how to capture certain objects, backgrounds, I try to do one study drawing a week. Here are the ones from this month:
#FanArt - I am getting to enjoy this quite a bit…
Writing
I continued to write 3 pieces a week on the 唐詩一百畫 (100 Drawings of Tang Dynasty Poems) project - extending from the drawings, I am adding translation, reflection and additional notes for each poem. This is shared with my Patreon members every week!
‘Impressions’ book - This is a project that will last a while (probably 2 years) - it’s taking a slow burn this month.
The Web
My Patreon members continue to get all the full resolution arts and pre-released book writing every week! I am also looking forward to providing soft copies of my books and games to my patrons later this year.
Website and Merch Store - no updates, but check it out!
Hacking - Occasionally I still hack around devops/linux stuffs - continue to play with my Raspberry Pi boxes - set up docker containers to run nginx for load balancing/reverse proxying, another container to run node.js app.
Consuming Stuffs
Reading - Continue to read “The Dead Are Arising - The Life of Malcolm X”
Gaming - Shadow of Tomb Raider 49%; decided to take a break on Horizon Zero Dawn and get started with Bioshock 2
TV/Movies - Barbarian, M3gan, The Banshees of Inisherin, Godzila (2014), Kong: Skull Island, Mandalorian S3. The Last of Us (yes! it’s all true, the show is sooo good!);
Learning - continuing with the Udemy course on Rust.
That’s it for this issue of my newsletter! If you really finished reading the above, I thank you, and wish that my sharing would either entertain you, or inspire you (if you’ve been thinking about your own creative projects).